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Friday, October 24, 2008

Quote of Day

“I have reached out to the White House, to other black GOP leaders in our area and asked them to cite policy and legislation that has been put forth from Republican hands,” Mr. Lewis said. “And the response that I have gotten—and I am being very frank with you all — has been, well, ‘John McCain has spoken before the NAACP,’” he said. “I am dumbfounded,”

Black Republicans ridicule Black Democrats for staying on the "plantation". Fannie Lou Hamer was part of the Mississippi Freedom Party an organization that rode buses to the Democratic Party Convention and basically staged a sit in. This was a group of African-Americans with little power who had the backbone to challenge power.

If Black Republican youth is so emasculated and does nothing when disrespected, how can you tell me anything about Barack Obama having only dreams but no plan? I suggest you ladies and gentlemen look in the mirror to find shackled minds.

As I type this, Allen Raymond an ex-Republican trickster ("How To Rig An Election") is telling Bill Mahrer how he suppressed the vote in the African-American community. There is rot in your political party.

If Black Republicans can't deal with their own party's failures, you cannot be a role model for moving off of a plantation.

The Manila Times had an article that included the statement in context

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Black Republicans struggle to be heard

WASHINGTON, D.C.: At the elite Howard University in Washington, where most students are African-American and most are enthralled at the prospect of electing America’s first black president next month, conservatives are a lonely crew.

The handful who have dared to go against the overwhelmingly Democratic tide on campus and join the College Republicans said peers have called them everything from “crazy” to “racist and bigoted” for their beliefs.

Reginald Darby, 21, a political science major, believes he broke his mother’s heart when he told her he was planning to vote for John McCain.

“I pick experience over everything,” said Darby, the vice president of the Howard University College Republicans, a group of about 10 on a campus of 11,000 students.

“[Barack] Obama has a lot of wistful thinking, a lot of ideas. I have never seen him build on those ideas and make them a reality.”

Darby met with his black Republican counterparts one recent evening on campus to discuss conservative ideals rarely heard in the American black community, which has voted 90-percent Democratic in recent presidential elections.

The president of the group, Cameron Lewis, 21, a major in African-American studies, said he was drawn to the Republican Party for its “strong emphasis on hard work and self-reliance,” and opposes “the Democratic welfare policies which perpetuate dependency and cycles of poverty among minorities, women and children.”

Party gripes

But Lewis, like about half the group, admitted he was troubled by the lack of engagement by the Republican Party (often called the GOP for “Grand Old Party”) in the black community, and may end up voting for Obama.

“I have reached out to the White House, to other black GOP leaders in our area and asked them to cite policy and legislation that has been put forth from Republican hands,” Lewis told the group.

“And the response that I have gotten—and I am being very frank with you all—has been, well, ‘John McCain has spoken before the NAACP,’” he said, referring to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a national civil rights group.

“I am dumbfounded,” said Lewis. “I think that is an opportunity for us to make sure that our community is not overlooked, even though our community may see us as racist, or bigots, or whatever.”

Barriers against blacks

The College Republicans said that when it comes to politics, blacks face barriers that other minority groups do not, such as Hispanics who are courted by both parties because as a group they are split between conservatives and liberals.

For Kendra Hill, 20, the group’s political liaison, Obama’s campaign promise to help the middleclass rings hollow.

“I feel like we need to get back to the fact that we’re black,” she said. “Middleclass America is not black. But all these black people are so quick to say ‘Oh, Obama, he’s going to make things better for us,’” she said.

“Typical middleclass America is white,” she said. “Typical black America is making less than $30,000 a year.”

Party of Lincoln

Timothy Jenkins, 69, an alumnus of Howard, agreed.

“The whole concept of poor people is not in the debate. The black community has not spread itself to both parties, so they can be ignored by both.”

Jenkins reminded the students that the Republican Party, which first came to power in 1860 with the election of President Abraham Lincoln, was spearheaded by anti-slavery activists.

“The Republican Party was built by black people and it started on an agenda to deal with something that was critical to the black community, namely the ending of slavery,” he said.

And he urged the students to take advantage of what they see as the lack of attention to their community, with blacks about 12 percent of the US population as a whole, pointing out that neither party has included urban policy in their party platforms.

“You could create an urban policy in the Republican Party and you could advocate it as something that is coming from the College Republicans,” Jenkins said.

“Define what the urban policy should be. Persuade people to join it.”

“I like that,” said Hill.

And with that, they closed the 90-minute discussion, saving for another time talks on how to craft such a policy, some four decades after the controversial installment of affirmative action.

“They are ostracized. People say ‘go away, you’re a betrayal to your race,’” the university’s president of the College Democrats, Amal Bennett-Judge, 20, told Agence France-Presse later by phone.

“A lot of the time I find myself defending them, because for African-Americans to be taken seriously in the political world, they have to be on both sides.”

Republicans reflexively deride Democrats. Most of the time this is cover to overlook the disrespect Black republicans get from the GOP.The Obama proposed tax cuts for the average citizen puts more money in the pockets of a significant number of Black Americans.

I wonder if they talked to Shannon Reeves? He graduated from an HBCU in the 1980s and was president of the California NAACP for a while. He left CA for DC to head up the RNC Coalition branch. He's a really great guy, but he's an old-school Republican I think... he's pretty outspoken in his criticisms of both major parties.

I also wonder if they reached out to folks like Bill Coleman, Ed Brooke, Jim Calhoun, Bob Brown, Clarence Townes... etc. all major players in the GOP 1960s-1980s but they tend to be moderate-liberal Republicans of the Colin Powell variety... and they don't hesitate to criticize the party failings. But if you talk with them, all of them stress the importance of two-party competition and economic independence. So it'd really be worthwhile.